Laptop Returned, Money Saved, Old Computer Optimized!

After much debate, I walked over to the Apple store and returned my oh so sweet Macbook Pro. Today was the last day until the return policy expired. I actually felt a little bit sad, because I got to see the laptop when the store clerked cut open the sticker to make sure I wasn’t returning a couple cement blocks instead. My reasoning to return were quite simple:

No reasonable bids came in for my 8GB, iPod touch for $199 because the day after Apple stopped their promotion of a free iPod with every Macbook purchase, they lowered their price from $239 to $199! I didn’t change my pricing until the second week, and by that time, it was a little too late to negotiate.

My guest post failed to get published within two weeks at this large personal finance site. I made a submission with outline, thesis, and bio which was immediately responded to and accepted the very next day. Several hours were spent writing 1,350 words, as well as several more hours revising. Although they have confirmed receipt of my 2nd draft, it’s still in the queue. At least I got a nice $10 gift card at Amazon! :)

My cash flow cannot afford $1,465 for September because a $1,700 bill is coming due for a couple airlines tickets purchased at the end of August. I try to only buy stuff through cash flow, and never touch savings, otherwise how will I ever build a big enough nut for retirement? Going into revolvingcredit card debt is NOT an option and never will be!

I made a promise not to buy anything in September and feel guilty breaking a promise. With only 6 more days left to go for the month, I need……… to……. stand…….. strong……… and fight the spending addiction! I wonder if this is how a recovering addict feels, where every day of non-use, and in my case non-spend, is a victory? It feels good to go 24 days in a row without buying anything other than food!

Finally, mywife actually fixed my old iBook G4! Its speed is as good as new thanks to several updates and clean ups. Too bad the battery life only lasts 25 minutes now.

I am one of the biggest computer morons on earth. One time, I think i started panicking when the computer wouldn’t turn on, until I realized it wasn’t plugged in :) I get so frustrated trying to fix things myself I’d GLADLY pay some person $100 bucks an hour to fix a bug, or a Slow internet. It’s just hard to trust every shady ad on Craigslist. Thank goodness for my wife, and her patience!

After two weeks of temptation, I had to let the babies go. It’s interesting to note that over this time period, the laptop and iPod got burried under a mountain of clothes, papers, and new shoes. The clutter syndrome was in full effect! I’m disappointed not so much by the fact I’m not typing to you on a new computer. Frankly, it feels good to get $1,450 credited back on my card. It’s just disappointing I failed at achieving all my mini-goals to justify the purchase. C’est la vie. Maybe next year!

Sam started Financial Samurai in 2009 during the depths of the financial crisis as a way to make sense of chaos. After 13 years working on Wall Street, Sam decided to retire in 2012 to utilize everything he learned in business school to focus on online entrepreneurship.

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The question becomes how much time do you waste with the existing portable. Being slow and with a small battery life and more than likely 5 years old. I’ve found in most cases a computer older than 5 years (desktop, portable, server) is almost never worth keeping because of the cost to upgrade or repair, or the time lost in how long it takes to run newer applications.

In my case using computers daily and quite a bit (since that’s my biz), the $2400.00 new MacBook Pro I just bought, is MUCH faster than the old G4 I also have. It boots in less than 30 seconds and has a battery life of approx 6 hours. If you didn’t use the portable frequently you are correct in returning the new portable, if you use it daily for hours on end the new portable was well worth the expense (which was 0% for 12 months through Apple) and in addition is a business purpose. It becomes more obvious when you are billing clients at an hourly rate with it.

@Larry L, New York Larry, I agree. The only place I take my old G4 is up the stairs, and then back down the stairs.

The battery life is a killer (bad) now at only 25 minutes I admit. I long for the 6 hr battery life of the new Pro’s.

If I ever decide to make an income from FS, or of Rupert Murdoch ever decides to buy us out, a laptop business expense would be perfect! BTW, do you know if there are income caps on my existing job to expense?? Or, do I have to incorporate a new company first?

@Larry L, New York Ok, will do Larry. When I use the tax software and put a sample business expense in, it never seems to save me any money. Says the expense has to be at least a certain % of revenue or something. Hence, if you are running a highly profitable business and have huge margins, then a lot of expenses won’t fly I guess what the gov’t is telling us.

@David@DINKS Finance Yeah, my iBook G4 is 5 years old. Actually, I just realized this iBook was originally my wife’s! I bought it for her Christmas 5 years ago before moving into our house. Hmm….. I bought her, her current one, and the old one which is now mine, is a hand me down. Gosh, I’m a nice guy. Actually, maybe I have a problem rewarding myself, or just find pleasure giving things to others.

I just really dislike computers David. They are draining after a full day’s work, and break a lot. Mac’s have been much better than PC’s though.

I added $1,450 to my “Freedom Fund” on the right. Road to $1 million here I come!

swapping out the processor might be difficult and/or impossible with chips/motherboards being upgraded in 5 years (motorola->intel), but like automobiles, the labor charges for computer repairs are insane. At “geeksquad” it’s $50 for hardware install. It takes ~3 minutes to install RAM on a laptop (desktop PCs less). that’s $1000 / hour. Yikes.

Here are some laptop upgrades you may be able to do yourself:

–buy a bigger hard drive, and an external usb enclosure. swap out your current HD for the new one and use your old one for a backup.

–If your machine can handle it, buy more ram. I got 4 gigs of ram for $70 (-$30 rebate) at newegg and installed it in minutes. go to crucial.com to find the ram for you machine– then shop around for it.

I would go as far to say, one should never buy new laptops with these upgrades pre-installed, or even buy these upgrades from Apple. the ram upgrade i mentioned above at Apple is $200. HD and ram upgrades are pretty easy DIY stuff and can be found for great deals around the internet (newegg, tigerdirect, zipzoomfly…).

imho, the only things that _really_ matter in a new laptop is the processor, then, the video card.

If you’re not spending a lot of time editing video/music/photos/programming/protein folding/etc. do you really need something new and ultra fast? (you’ve already answered that :) )

Hey Canz! Good tips. I think my memory drive is full i.e. it has two, 256KB chips in it already yiiihaw! I just took the laptop to the rest room this morning to do some editing, and before I could finish, the battery died :( I’m definitely gonna get a new battery, b/c a 8 minute battery life is ridiculous!

Thanks for the encouragement. I used to love playing games on the computer 10 years ago, and would probably still do so now if I had time, but I don’t.

Cool computer programing site you got there btw! I’m so horrendous at everything computer related, it’s a miracle I’ve got this site up.

@admin if it already has two chips… that’s no prob! as long as the machine can handle > 512KB ram, just get 2 more chips at 512KB each… or more!!! (i took out both original sticks in mine for a 2x2GB upgrade) :)

thanks, though it’s totally yuck– spend all day working on sites– don’t want to come home and deal with more of them…

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